


make a Fury of me—

by grenadier (5H4E)



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Gen, warning for mentions of violence rather than actual depictions of it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-20
Updated: 2021-02-20
Packaged: 2021-03-16 06:56:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29572104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/5H4E/pseuds/grenadier
Summary: Kallian’s journey to Ostagar with Duncan.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> title from: Elizabeth Hewer, from “Finding Ariadne” in Wishing for Birds (““Give me blood and rage and / a heart for horror; teach me to be / tough enough to face this world / still standing. Make a Fury of me.”)

The old portcullis, that pallid grey and rain-lashed rusted head of the skeleton of the old city walls, looms tall and dark as they approach it.

Kallian has never left the city, before; she thinks, feeling the crackling of dried blood, peeling, off her fingers, that she will never come back to it now.

She is wrapped in Duncan’s grey cloak, bundled out of the Alienage, barefoot, in his shadow. She closes her eyes, before they pass under the portcullis, counting her footsteps – _one, two, three, four five_ – just waiting for it. The city guard, the Arl’s men, silver and black-blued armoured men, the sound of scraping metal, or the Grey Warden’s hands on her. She hadn’t had time to wash the blood from her hair.

But nothing happens. Kallian opens her eyes, Denerim fuzzing into focus. She sees the familiar grey of the cobblestones under her, the green of the moss and ivy crawling up the walls to her right, and beyond, a million miles away, the reds and oranges and blues of silks and velvets of noble ladies’ gowns, the expanse of market place stalls. There’s a city guardsman watching two elven servants buying candles, and somewhere a dog is barking, a baby crying, and her stomach is lurching, and through it all, there is blood and torn skin under her nails.

She can’t stop herself from turning back as they pass under the portcullis, to catch one last sight of the Alienage, of the dappling of green as the top of the _vhenedahl_ peeks over the tallest buildings of her home.

It’s not her home anymore.

The cobblestones are hard against the bones of the flats of her feet, and Duncan’s cloak is heavy around her shoulders.


	2. Chapter 2

Duncan pays for a new chemise, and a human child’s woollen petticoat, from a seamstress’ shop on the way out of Denerim. He didn’t have enough bits to pay for it, only silver, and he hadn’t bothered to wait for change back, waving his hand dispassionately when the old woman reached for a jar to count out the bits he had overpaid. Kallian tries not to, looks up and accidentally catches the eye of the seamstress, who smiles blandly and ushers her along. She does not question the sight of a wealthy human man dragging around a young elf girl. It is not uncommon for men to have their fancies. A wife would feel less threatened by her husband having a pet, than a human mistress.

Kallian is shooed into a side chamber with a cracked window by the woman. Finally alone.

She strips down to her stockings. She pulls on the new chemise; it had been the smallest one the shop had, and it is still just a little too big on her. She nudges at hers on the floor with her feet. It feels like such a waste to leave it behind, as undoubtedly Duncan intended. But the Arl’s son’s blood has soaked through to it, and she has no way of carrying it. She kicks it aside, feeling unclean, feeling the dirt deep down to her bones. Next goes back on her stays, dark green coloured, her arms poked through the holes and the fabric and metal looped over her head and synched at the front. She likes the tying of the stays, likes the familiarity of it, the precious seconds of mindfulness it allows her. Bloodied fingers still able to make all the right loops, despite the trembling. Then the petticoat, brown, tied at the sides. It is short enough, but loose around her waist – fit for human hips – and when she emerges, Duncan gives her one of his belts, to tie around her waist to keep everything in place.

The silver Grey Warden buckle gleams around her ribcage. Looking at it, rather than her, the lady fidgets with her fingers and asks Duncan if he would rather she provide Kallian with a fetching dress, or at least a more fetching chemise. When Duncan tries to touch her tonight, Kallian will pluck his eyes out before he gets a chance, she decides then and there.

They burn the bloodied dress at camp. It had been her mother’s, and grandmother’s before that, and innumerate other girls of the Alienage, all distant family and scraps of elven history, all threaded together by blood and a gown now wilting to ashes. A small part of her twinges before letting go of the fabric, wants to kick at the dirt under her feet and screech and bolt. But the damage has already been done. The dress should be home, miles and miles away from here, and bloodless, anyway. The damage has already been done. The dress is already burning. It has been burning for hours.


	3. Chapter 3

She is bundled onto the back of Duncan’s horse as they leave Denerim, and forced to grip his waist until the hard edges of his plate armour dig into her fingers and start to throb.

He had, at first, offered to buy a little pony or small horse for her at a stable inn, something small and sturdy. But she doesn’t know how to ride, and he didn’t have time to teach her.

“Don’t worry,” he’d said, as he worked the various straps of leather and their clinking buckles, for the saddle and stirrups, and all the other parts of the horse’s equipment that Kallian did not know the name of. “We will have plenty of time to teach you how to tack up, and ride, when we get to Ostagar. I’m sure you’ll learn to love it,”

Kallian had said nothing, resisted commenting on how learning to ride had not been a pressing worry of hers up until that moment. She had had no need to learn to ride or tend to the welfare of horses, had never worked with great beasts before. She had worked as an apprentice to a seamstress from the age of thee-and-ten, had embroidered covers for Lords’ and Ladies’ books, their almanacs and little prayer books, or made up ornate cushions for their private chambers. She had made countless chemises and petticoats and outergowns for those of a more middling class. All from a little side room at the back, draped in an old faded tapestry to keep out the chill, so that visiting customers could not see that an elf was making their goods. There had been no need, then, to know anything at all about the welfare of animals, beyond the few riding cloaks she had stitched.

Still, she thought, watching the Grey Warden who was stealing her away from all that; there was something foreign yet familiar about the way that he carefully dressed the horse in it’s leather. He had measured out lengths, across his arm span, and threaded, like a needle, the straps hanging those nicked, metal, half-circle shaped boot-holders, and it looked enough like the fitting of stays, to her.

After the last of Duncan’s fastidious buckling and threading and pulling and the sound of leather _thwp_ -ing had stopped, he pushed a bar of metal into the beast’s mouth, and the animal had made an irritated noise and Kallian had felt sure that Duncan was going to be bitten, but nothing of the sort happened. He’d offered to lift her onto the horse’s back, but she’d imagined his large, calloused hands on her waist, engulfing her, and the feeling of her not feeling the ground under her feet, and she’d refused until he’d fetched a step ladder and a tall barrel for her to climb atop. Lifting her skirts above her knees (for that couldn’t be helped, despite how hard she blushed and how much she had to blink back fat tears from her eyes) she’d tentatively pushed herself onto the horse, rising a leg over his hind, and perched, nervously, atop his plush saddle.

She found herself, in that moment, wishing miserably that she had taken up his offer for a smaller horse, or pony, to be found, for she felt perilously high off the ground, and utterly out of control should the horse move at all. At one point, the horse had shifted it’s weight from one side to the other, and she had wobbled dangerously and bruised her fingers clutching at the leather and metal of his saddle, and ducked herself down as low as she could, until the muscles in her back and legs started to ache.

Then Duncan was pulling himself onto it’s back, too, plate armour clinking like dulled bells, and the saddle budges, just a little, at his weight being shifted across the animal’s back, and Kallian can’t stop herself from grabbing at his waist as he settles into place, petrified at the thought of falling.

Riding is, she finds, uncomfortable. The saddle isn’t equipped for two people, and she’s perched on the stiff arched back of it, half sliding off onto the threadbare padded cloth tucked between the leather saddle and the horse’s back. Her thighs hurt from the position, and her back aches from the rolling motion of riding, but she thinks, tentatively, she’s gotten over the thing, gotten her head round it, at least.

It’s as the clouds start to roll in, at last beating out the streams of hot sunshine from earlier in the day, and the air starts to smell less of the city, that she realises she had quite forgotten


End file.
